


devil's spoke

by lastwingedthing



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 11:19:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastwingedthing/pseuds/lastwingedthing
Summary: Stateira grew up as spoils of war, in the baggage train of Alexander.





	devil's spoke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/gifts).



> I've always been interested in Stateira, despite or maybe because of the small size of the role she played in the books; thank you for giving me the chance to write about her!

“Father isn’t a Great King, he’s a coward. We're just baggage now. He won’t come back for us.”

Silence spilled out after her words and spread until it filled the room entirely. Stateira hadn’t spoken loudly – hadn’t meant to speak at all, until the words were already tumbling out of her – but there was no part of the dim close quiet of the largest harem wagon that hadn’t heard her, all the same.

Her mother stared down at her, tall and trembling, until Stateira had to lower her eyes against the shocked anger in her face.

“Liar,” he mother said finally, deadly soft. And suddenly her hand was there, raised for a hard slap like she’d use to chastise a tardy slave.

She’d never hit any of her children before.

“Liar!”

At the second slap Stateira fell to the ground. _I won’t cry_ , she thought desperately, and at first that was easy; she felt stunned more than hurt, it took a while for the pain to start. _I won’t be a coward, and I’m_ not _a liar_ …

She thought Mother might try to hit her again, but instead two of the bolder concubines managed to coax Mother away to her own private wagon and its soothing nest of fur and silk.

The room quietened, while Stateira lay waiting on the floor.

Finally she stood, still choking back her tears. Someone must have called for Grandmother, because now she was sitting in her chair at the back of the room, straight-backed and firm. There was a silver bowl of cool herb-strewn water on the table beside her, the kind the eunuchs always brought out to treat a bruise or a strain, and Stateira swallowed when she saw it; Grandmother, at least, was not going to beat her.

“Come here, child,” Grandmother said, impatient more than kind.

“Mother will be angry with you,” Stateira mumbled; both her cheeks were stinging now, she could feel the raised red heat of them.

Grandmother just lifted her eyebrows, saying nothing, but at her expression Stateira remembered that she was the mother and the daughter of a Great King, not merely a wife. Stateira didn’t often see her using her rank to give Mother orders, but maybe that was only because she didn’t need to.

“I wasn’t lying,” Stateira said at last, as the lovely coolness of a wet silk cloth was laid onto her face. “It’s true, I know it’s true. He’s not coming for us, ever.”

Grandmother sighed, her mouth a thin line, but her hands stayed gentle. “That may be so, but why did you say it? The truth’s the truth, child, regardless of whether you speak it aloud. Truth doesn’t need _your_ words to make it so. One mustn’t lie, but there’s a time for silence, too.”

Stateira opened her mouth to reply to this – then saw the lesson and kept it closed instead. Grandmother’s words didn’t exactly sound like the things the Magi said at festivals, about lies and the Truth, but she could see the sense in them all the same.

The cool cloth took away some of the sting in her cheeks, but that made it easier to feel the tightness around her eyes that meant tears trying to break their way free. Stateira gritted her teeth, still fighting to keep them back.

“It’s been a year,” Stateira whispered at last, unable to hold the words back any longer despite all Grandmother's admonitions. “If Father really wanted to, he could have sent his armies for us months ago, while we were stuck at Gaza or Tyre. If he hadn’t run away at Issus…”

There was a strange smile on Grandmother’s face. “You are right, child, and your mother is wrong. The barbarian is more of a Great King than your father will ever be. But that’s not an easy dish to swallow, is it? Keep your silence. Your mother will learn to see the truth in the end.”

Stateira nodded, eyes still prickling; but she was proud, too. It felt good, to have this secret between her and her grandmother; it felt good to know she was like grandmother, and could face a hard truth when she had to.

She wasn’t too cowardly to see the truth right in front of her. Not like her parents.

 

 

After Mother’s death, the King sent many of her father’s concubines away – given them to his strongest supporters, Macedonians and Persians alike, the eunuchs had told Grandmother, in hushed voices so they could pretend that the younger girls couldn’t hear them. With them went their personal maids and eunuchs and many of the other serving women, too, until the carpet-swaddled harem wagons, which had once seemed full to bursting with the Great King’s women, had fallen still and silent.

The eunuchs all agreed that the King had kept none of the women for himself. Stateira still could not decide if that was reassuring or terrifying.

It was only Stateira and Drypetis and Grandmother now, and their attendants, and a handful of other noble Persian ladies under the King’s protection; only a very small handful to fill so many harem wagons. It was nice to have a little more space to one’s self and for one’s things, and nice, sometimes, to have a little quiet; but more often it was lonely. Stateira wasn’t sure she missed Mother, exactly, but her absence was a black gap in the centre of their life here, like a missing floorboard one could trip and fall into before one realised it had gone.

 _Things will be different once we’re back in Susa_ , Stateira told herself, but it was hard to believe it. For so long life had been wheeled and mobile, all of the harem enclosed and shrouded in the wood and cloth of the great wagons. It seemed impossible to believe that they had once lived in the harem quarters of a palace; that life had happened in cool stone rooms that opened into shaded gardens, all of them together in the same place day after day and month after month. There had been fountains, and fine household goods, and dishes fit for a Great King – all the things Mother had mourned over almost every day of her captivity, until the sickness grew so strong in her that she did not speak at all. In the wagons they were fed meals from the King’s own table, but since that King ate like a barbarian, the honour didn’t mean much.

The only thing you could say about the harem wagons was that they made it easier to spy on the outside world. Now that most of the harem was gone, all Stateira had to do was tell Grandmother that she was tired, and she’d be left alone in her curtained segment of the wagon with only a pair of gossiping maids outside the curtains to watch over her. Years ago Stateira had found a gap in the wall hangings that corresponded with a crack in the wooden slats of the wagon; long bored afternoons had seen her widen it until she could lie on her bed with one eye pressed against the wall, and watch the world walk past outside.

Some days she saw scarred Macedonian veterans march past in formation, somehow managing to move their terrifying sarissas in smooth unison without tangling them; or Persian horsemen with their bows, elegant and graceful enough to make Stateira’s heart pound; or Egyptian infantry with their bald heads shining in the sunlight. Sometimes even the King himself – who walked among his men like a common soldier, without any marks of rank or deference from his men to mark him out from them, yet was somehow always recognisable – but more often only couriers or grooms or quartermasters on busy errands, men carrying sacks of grain or gold or weapons, or leading loud complaining goats away for slaughter.

Some days it rained, a beautiful glistening gift from the heavens. Some days the sun shone blindingly bright on dust or sand or turf; sometimes there were clouds, misty rain. She saw reedbeds in Egypt, mountain peaks in Persia, even a few glimpses of the great Ocean.

She would never be able to look at the outside world like this in Susa – there’d be no chance, behind the high palace walls.

Grandmother thought that the King was going to marry Stateira. She didn’t talk about it much – it was more in the silences, the things she didn’t say. The compliments and praise she had for the King after he visited her, or when he sent fine gifts and letters to the harem. Stateira was getting better at reading meaning round the edges of her words.

She thought, sometimes, that if Grandmother said it out loud, she could at least argue – say that if the King had wanted her, he could have taken her a hundred times over by now. Said that anyway he’d never want a coward’s blood polluting his line.

Grandmother never did say it out loud, though. Stateira had only herself and sometimes Drypetis as the audience for her arguments, which grew more elaborate and elegantly constructed as she sat brooding over them, day after endless day.

And then the news came that the King was going to leave them in Susa while he followed after her father. Grandmother was the one who told them, arching her eyebrows as she told Stateira and Drypetis that the King was leaving teachers behind with them, so they could learn to speak Greek.

“Men?” Stateira said in a squeak, half a breath before her sister. “The king is letting men into the harem?”

The corner of grandmother’s mouth twitched up. “Barbarians trust their women better than Persians do, it seems. Don’t get too excited – you’ll never be alone with them. There’s maids and eunuchs here still – and me, too, for that matter.”

Grandmother alone would be more than enough, though that wasn't what Stateira or her sister had meant. She knew that neither of them would have any interest in polluting their purity with some barbarian servant, but there was no point in arguing with Grandmother about it when she was in this kind of mood.

Drypetis bit her lip. “Why does the King want us to speak Greek?” she asked slowly.

Stateira said nothing. She could read the answer in Grandmother’s eyes – in her look of proud satisfaction – Grandmother would get what she’d been hoping for, then.

And in the pounding of her own heart she realised at last that she’d been afraid of it, all this time. Afraid of the King – of her future – afraid of stone walls closing her in forever, caught in a trap with a barbarian man who'd never love her, who she could never love - 

Stateira had been told over and over to be grateful to have been treated with respect after the King had captured them, instead of merely as the spoils of war - but regardless of the pretty veneer of civility, spoils of war was still the truth of what they were. Grandmother might have been swayed by the King's boldness and fine words, but Stateira knew that they'd always just been baggage to him; valuable, as everything the King had taken from her father was valuable, but baggage all the same. He'd take her in the same way he'd taken her father's tent and his treasure and his empire. 

But what did it matter, if she was afraid? Even if she'd wanted to, she'd never be able to run like her father had - but she didn't want to run. She'd face her fear and her fate directly, head held high.

She didn't have to be a coward like her father, she  _could_ be brave.

She raised her chin and said, “If the King asks it, I’ll learn for him.”

**Author's Note:**

> There is an issue with the names here that I am very sorry about- technically Stateira II (who married Alexander) didn't actually take that name until her wedding - but a) I couldn't, with my very limited access to reference materials, find out any information about what her original name might have been, and b) even if I had found it, it would make things confusing to use it, since everyone knows her as Stateira. 
> 
> Mary Renault very sneakily doesn't use her name at all in the first half of The Persian Boy, but seeing as I wanted to write a story from her POV, that wasn't an option!


End file.
